New Baroque Derangement
by Gabrielle Bates
I was conceived in a restless biome, a riot of wisteria.
Unguarded. Bitch of blue.
A woman pushed her tongue into my mouth
and it was good weather.
There were spirals, spirals at the heart
as pure lass辞鈥攊ce pure loss
skipping liquid, straight to air
I could and couldn鈥檛 bare
because I was and wasn鈥檛.
Combing a lone shore there
under the moonlit backwash
of receding waves, all that grit in my
gums and oceanscape鈥檚
overlappings, I am telling you
in that fading cyanic
I saw your faces. In the sands. I saw.
Every person I might have been or birthed
I could not reach but I could see.
A consciousness I鈥檇 once called mine
clambering into a swan boat.
And high above, and far around,
the rope of air caught music鈥檚
meat. I saw what seeing used to mean.
There was a stretch, a few years ago, when several people I loved, blood family and chosen family, died in fairly quick succession. Swans started visiting me as a kind of phantasm, in poems and in dreams, and they felt related to those deaths in a way I couldn鈥檛 articulate.
Then came a stretch when I was sleep deprived for about eight months, living in proximity to a particular kind of madness. The derangement prefigured in the title of this poem; the sense that one exists and doesn鈥檛 exist, simultaneously; the grandiosity and desperation characteristic of sanity鈥檚 precipice鈥 see that context bleeding through.
When I started writing new poems after publishing my first book, I felt unmoored, liberated, prone to experimentation. In the wake of Judas Goat, which I dedicated to the image, I started hunting with increasing fervor for my 鈥渘ew music, new mind鈥� (to slightly misquote William Carlos Williams), taking the music part fairly literally, attempting new-to-me approaches to sound patterning, with the hopes that this might activate a meaningful new depth, or at least serve as a kind of aesthetic palette cleanser, so I could return to my previous modes with renewed belief. Now, in early drafts, when I feel stuck, I鈥檒l often take all the consonant sounds in the first half of a line and repeat them, with different vowels between them, in the second half of the line, as a Cynghanedd-inspired generative strategy (the line 鈥渁s pure lass辞鈥攊ce pure loss鈥� is a small example that endures here). While the complicated sonic Welsh grammar of Cynghanedd can鈥檛 really be applied to English, attempting to adapt its principles has kept my brain alive on days when it feels in danger of shutting down.
Poetry has always been a place where I can risk in ways I can鈥檛, or won鈥檛, elsewhere. Sometimes it feels like psychic bloodletting鈥攔eleasing the unruly, the extravagant, the strange. I am trying, in poems, to honor the depth, possibility, aliveness, and connection I struggle to feel, at times, elsewhere.
鈥檚 poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Sewanee Review, and Ploughshares, and her debut collection, Judas Goat, was named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR and Electric Literature. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, teaches occasionally through the University of Washington, and co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon.